Kyksie

Big Magic Blowout - 41612 1) A bit low on funds after dropping a few notes at Big Alex's Tokeville, Kyksie scouts around for odd jobs, and is contacted by "Eddy Demonalo", which isn't foreboding at all. He tells her that a demon lord is bothering him, and to get rid of it we need... souls? And to get them, we need to... go to a Family drug party and murder them all? "Sure, no problem!" Kyksie chirps. She ventures boldly into a warehouse rave and kicks a few dozen Mafiosi to death. Yep, it's a defeat all. Upon returning, Eddy congratulates her on killing "hundreds of men with wives and children", really. 2) Oh dear, their souls have all escaped. Kyksie goes to a cave and kicks ghosts. Great, another defeat all. 3) Now, time to "bind" the demon lord. Into another cave, where we kick the EB demon lord Katsu into submission. There's a custom group, with four or five types. 4) Whoops, things have gone a bit sideways, and the demon lord has split into lots of little demons, and we can't have that, now can we? Kyksie arrives in Atlas Park, and kicks NINE more EB Demon Lords... and then a tenth spawns, with boss allies. 5) And now Eddie has devoured the demon lord's power and is a demon lord himself. MY OH MY WHAT A SURPRISE!!! I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING!!! No, actually that's sarcasm, I saw that coming as soon as the arc began. Kyksie heads into the sewers and is reduced to level 20, (supposedly the mission author has since fixed this) kicks Eddy many times, and stuffs his soul into a handy-dandy soul disposal receptacle which the Atlas Park Municipal Planning board thoughtfully included in every sewer, bus stop and subway station. Big Magic Blowout has big problems. First, it's very time waste-y, with two defeat alls and twelve EBs. The writing is decent, with no spelling errors, but the morality is a bit odd, and by 'a bit odd', I mean "completely off the rails". The arc is written as Vigilante, but flat-out murdering dozens of guys goes way beyond Vigilante stuff, yet the player cheerfully does as she's told. Worst of all, the player is forced to carry the Idiot Ball, working for someone who is clearly evil, but again the player blindly obeys.

I played the "Beta" of Magic Legends, and it was terrible. I'm putting "Beta" in "quotes" because it was basically "Here it is, there's bugs but start giving us money anyway". Crummy graphics, poorly optimized, and the gameplay managed to be too simple and too complex at the same time, a goal many bad games strive for but few achieve. It's really sad how far down the toilet Cryptic has slid in the past 20 years.

Damnatio Memoriae - 41140 Belladonna Vetrano is the contact, who tells us that Cole is moving forward with his plan to finally capture and eat the Smurfs. Calvin Scott went to Enriche factory, so Kyksie follows him, and find that the factory has construction equipment lying around. Then Kyksie goes to a black site and kicks stuff, then she kicks more stuff, and more stuff, then a grand finale against an Olympian Guard in the statesman lava room, although the guard is only an lt. Finally we find Calvin, who has uncovered proof that Enriche Classic is the exact same as New Enriche. Once again, another great arc with copious writing, lots of clues, and no time wasters. My only gripe is that being reduced to level 24 is a bit annoying. I started to run this with Kyksie, but had to stop because she had only two attacks.

Most people don't admit to having read Empowered. "Uh... it was on a... friend's coffee table and the wind blew a page open. Yeah."

Pretty good. Because it's written for the heatwave contest, I won't review it myself.

Bumping this thread thanks to the people in another thread, who experienced the problem on their machines as well, so it's not my files that are corrupted.

It's a farm.

I played this on the Live server, it's pretty good. Well written, doesn't bog down. BTW, it's kinda bad etiquette to respond to a two year old post unless you have a real important reason.

HEAT WAVE - 41276 A thick, stifling heat has settled over the Rogue Isles. Snakes bask in the sun, Goldbrickers are only robbing air conditioner shops, Marcone capos frolic on the sandy Port Oakes beach. In his tower at the heart of Grandville, Lord Recluse gazes at the sweltering city beneath him, hatching a plan so cruel and vile that... ...sigh. As most of you have guessed by now, this is not a serious arc, mostly because I'm completely incapable of writing anything that's not humorous. This arc is actually a test. When the Live servers shut down, I saved the textfiles for my award-winning trilogy of AE arcs, re-reading them daily in hopes that CoH would come to life once more. When it did, I tried to upload and re-publish them here, but something weird happened. The arcs all have Lord Recluse as a contact, and his costume appears corrupted. I tried using different versions of Recluse as a contact, and all had the same problem. I posted seventeen times on the bug thread, and contacted the GMs via PM, Discord, snail mail and telegraph, but no response. Since it's possible that my local files were corrupted somehow, I created this mission as a test. Please take a run through, and let me know whether Recluse appears correctly on your client. Heck, you don't even have to play it, just open it up and take a look.

A bit barebones, but no major flaws. Mildly creepy at at the end.

Pentarchy of Punishment - 41032 The contact is a nanotechnology researcher, who tells us that badguys have infected his daughter with a nanotech poison, and will activate it unless he gives them his nanotech research, but he won't do that because they could do a lot of evil stuff with the research. Except that if they know how to make nanotech poisons that activate on command, they already know quite a bit, what more do they need? Ah well. Kyksie ventures into an Arachnos base filled with Rogue Warburg troops and kicks the EB boss, "Melissa Mayhem". She has a vial of antidote, but it was only on fifth of what's needed. Wait, if there's an antidote, why can't the scientist create it? Ah well. Melissa was also carrying an address of an island where we find the second boss, then pirates attack your ship led by the third boss, who in turn has a map leading to a volcanic island base where the Big Boss and also one other sub-boss are waiting. Congrats, the daughter is saved. Pentarchy of Punishment is one of those arcs that's not really bad but not really great. The writing is bland but plausible, the EBs are challenging but not too hard, and there are several funny touches sprinkled in. On the downside, there's a few spelling errors, no contact bio, and one boss is a bit of a stereotype.

Don't forget Pride Month's official AE adventure, The LGT BBQ, #28172.

Snakes From the Isles - 41022 The level range for this arc goes down to 10, so I call Scarlet's Web again. The contact is Agent Hahn, of Longbow, who tells me that some snakes are attacking an office building in Atlas, go check it out maybe? Scarlet arrives, and finds that the office is, in fact, under attack by large mutated snakes. She joins up with Agent Mila, and... hmmm, why is that cop attacking me? I mean, yeah, I'm an Arachnos Soldier, wearing an Arachnos uniform and snacking on Spiderling Scout cookies as I fight, but... wait, now a businessman is hostile to me as well? Pressing on, Mila and Scarlet discover that the office has a huge hole in the floor of one of the conference rooms, right next to the boardroom table with "Have that hole fixed, mmmmkay?" memoranda for next weeks meeting. In the tunnels below, we fight more snakes, and Agent Dupre... who shouts "I obey my master" and attacks? This leads me to suspect that the snakes possess some form of mind control. My suspicions are confirmed upon meeting the snake leader, Mesmer, whose eyes glow with unearthly energy as he focuses his mind. Scarlet freezes, her eyes glassy. Her hands move of their own accord, unbuttoning first her top, then her- Whoops! Sorry, I must have gotten this confused with the other arc I was reviewing, Malaise's Mind Control Harem. Here, the player is immune to the snakes' mind control for some unspecified reason. We pummel the snake leaders and return to base. Seeking information, we meet up with Mongoose and pay his bar tab in exchange for information. Evidence suggests that Arachnos is behind it, so we raid an Arachnos base where mind controlled troops are dancing to flutes. Then we raid an airbase, and finally infiltrate the Snake caves to defeat the leader. Snakes From the Isles is a nice fun arc. There's a few minor spelling errors and some custom mobs are missing descriptions, but if you want to see Black Swan, Bobcat, and Diablolique wearing nothing but- Whoops! Sorry!

Publish the story when your friends want to play it. Take it down afterwards. Or, give it a description "Fire farm, WIP". it will be buried among the 84832942 other fire farms.

Make a custom group containing the badguys. Make sure the group contains only bosses. Find a small or unique map wherein the spawnpoints for a particular location are all together. Put all of your spawns in that location. For example, the green X's in this map are the front, white the middle, blue the back. If you use this map and set all the encounters to "back", the y will all spawn together in that room. Just make sure the map has at least as many X's as you have mobs.

Of Guns and Asa Ronan - 41018 The level range is 5-15, so Kyksie called up a friend of hers, Scarlet's Web. A low-level Arachnos operative, Scarlet often finds herself short on money for Drenched Donuts and Crunchyroll, so she takes on some odd jobs for extra cash. Their good friend Billy Heck tells her that a Marcone weapons smuggler has gone missing, so the family either wants their money back or his head on a platter, or both. Scarlet ventures boldly into the sewer, and finds the smuggler and his buddies chopped up into little pieces and stuffed into Major Flanders boxes. One of his henchman, Anastasio, was not among the Mobster McNuggets they found, so the Family wants a word. The PPD have him in a safehouse, so Scarlet kicks the door down and fights some members of a custom group, the 'Stingers'. Pressing on, she spots an unusual sight at the end of a corridor... ...what could that be? The hallway ends in a sheet of darkness black as midnight. Scarlet carefully holds a hand nearby, and feels nothing; no sound, no breeze, no heat. It's like a rift has been torn in the world. Squinting, she sees within the faint echoes of a desolate realm; rocky outcroppings scoured by an alien breeze, wisps of dust in shapes almost human. Gritting her teeth, she gasps and dashes through- and at once is standing in another room in the safehouse, but with a gaping hole in the floor. Shaking off the unearthly chill, Scarlet lowers herself into the tunnels below, finds and captures Anastasio, and drags him kicking and screaming through the unholy barrier and back to the surface. What follows is almost anticlimactic: we find out that someone with the ability to duplicate himself is behind the attack. Scarlet captures him, then takes him to the Marcone don for a sit-down, but he breaks free and summons more clones, so we pummel him. The clones are rather difficult at level 10; Scarlet soon found herself eating inspirations before every fight and resting afterwards. The mysterious assassin is Asa Ronan, and it turns out he and the don have history, but at least we get paid. All that pales compared to the few terrifying seconds spent in the place between worlds, where time, space and death merge into one. Of Guns and Asa Ronan is another very well written arc, chronicling the chilling depths one might claw though as part of ones struggle to earn snack money.

I'm not sure. They're not specifically marked as such.

What, am I the only one who refers to set bonuses as 'boners'?

Some maps have 'running screaming people' baked into the map. They can be targeted but not attacked.

If you want to farm, Electric Armor can cap Energy resist easily, and there are Energy farms. Capping S/L is harder but it can be done with Tough and set boners.

Infection From the Isles - 40876 40915 A nice fun arc. The contact is Agent Hahn, who was probably a business major before joining Longbow, because her intro is filled with buzzwords like 'onboard' and 'deep dive'. Supposedly, Arachnos has made a change to the Infected, allowing them to infect others, which would be pretty bad, implying Lord Recluse has been playing lots of L4D and Fortnite. The zombie part of Fortnite, not the battle royale part. The player contains the zombies, meets with Matthew Burke, kicks some Arachnoses, then captures Dr. Creed, shutting down the source of zombies. The story here is pretty good, although not really special. What makes the arc stand out is the use of details. Like, the first mission is filled with wandering zombies who use the "zombie walk" animation; in one of the later missions, there's an Arachnos lookout, and when you kick him, a voice from further on cries "our lookout saw something!" Little touches like that turn an ordinary arc into an awesome one. The only downside is a few minor spelling/grammar errors. EDIT: the author has since released a new version, which not only fixes the spelling errors, but after you complete the first and fifth missions, a Longbow task force led by Ms. Liberty arrive and start scrubbing the zombie barf up off the floor. I haven't actually played the new version, but I'm going to assume this is what happens.

If you use a small-ish or unique map, find one with only one spawn point with a particular tag; say, there's only one "middle" point. Put the boss there, then when he's defeated, the Final Form spawns there.

Good resists, a damage aura, a passive 20% recharge bonus, and it keeps your end bar full in several ways.

Pretty good, a few minor spelling and grammar errors.

Yeet - 24206 A week has gone by with no requests for arc reviews, and boredom is beginning to set in. Kyksie has recovered the Liquid Computer and the P.L.O.T. device from the Council several times this week, enough to write a whole arc about a cola machine becoming sentient. Finishing off her Tankburger and Freem Fries from Up-N-Away, she wanders back to the Architect building in Atlas, wiping her greasy hands on her pink leggings. Sighing, she pokes through the latest fire farms, S/L farms, meow farms, and farms with plots, but finds nothing in need of reviewing. As she plucks the last fry from the paper bag, a ketchup packet falls out and bounces off the 'more' button on the architect panel. Bending over to pick it up, Kyksie notices something... Dear Lord, could it be? A random mission button! No more waiting around for people to submit arcs to be reviewed... with a single click, we now have access to whole galaxy of arcs! Kyksie reaches out and carefully presses the button, and the display instantly lights up... "Yeet"? Sounds like some sort of code word, maybe CIA or KGB. She approaches the contact, who has chosen to remain anonymous, hiding behind a featureless hologram. The contact regards her cautiously, before beckoning her closer and whispering a single word... ..."Yeet" again. What could it mean, and why is her mysterious handler afraid to say more? Nervously, she steps into the portal, and finds herself if a dingy, abandoned office, tasked only with confronting "the yeeter". Who or what could it be? Kyksie runs into a few Fifth Column troops and kicks them into submission, but the leader bites down on a cyanide tooth instead of letting himself be interrogated. Sighing, she gazes across the mildew-stained floors, and spies a half-rotted cardboard box covered in dust. Carefully, she peels back the layers of tape, opens the box, and... there it is. The yeeter. Cradling it in her arms, she heads out of the office and back to the contact. Wide-eyed with surprise, he takes it in his hard-light hands, and turns to depart, but then turns back to Kyksie and utters a single word... "Yeet" is destined to be a classic, with clear, concise dialog, no spelling errors, no time wasters, and no overpowered mobs. Definitely a Dev's Choice candidate.